Sikhs, Buddhists and Muslims on death penalty

Will Rogers once said, “We will never have a true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.” And I agree. But what that looks like in practice is sometimes no clearer than a foggy coastal Southern California morning in June.

In the case of Stanley “Tookie” Williams and his execution, many believed that to recognize his rights meant to grant him clemency, defined in 1833 by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall as “an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of laws, which exempts the individual, on whom it is bestowed, from the punishment the law inflicts.”

Williams’ lawyers argued that his death would only “satisfy some who are wedded to retribution,” but “do no good.” Yet the district attorney and others who sought the death penalty for Williams contended that offering the convicted killer clemency robbed his victims, Albert Owens, Yen-Yi Yang, Tsai-Shai Lin, Yee-Chen Lin and their families of their rights, which they believed was the right to justice.

On the last day of December 2005, a Washington Post editorial noted that the death penalty in the United States no longer has “the same attraction that it once had,” while at the same time concluding that “ending the death penalty in America, however, will not happen quickly.” I’d add, if it happens at all.

The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center reports that public support of the death penalty is at 64%. Among the nation’s religions with the most adherents -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- capital punishment still has many supporters. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam almost unanimously supports the death penalty, and the number of Muslims in the United States, which increased from 527,000 in 1999 to 1.55 million in 2004, continues to grow.

One document in a compendium of Muslim texts on the University of Southern California educational website points out, “In many non-Muslim societies today, there are ongoing debates about the death penalty. In Islam, this discussion is moot: the Creator has decided the matter for us.” The text quotes from the Koran: “The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto.”

When I asked Louai Jalabi, chairman of the outreach committee at the Islamic Institute of Orange County, about the debate concerning whether Williams should be executed, his e-mail reply affirmed, “Islam does support the death penalty.”

Apart from killing in self defense or in the defense of his family, home or county, if a man kills another man, he said, the “compensation has to be of an equal value, which is his life.”

As for allowing Williams’ apparent change in character while in prison to be a mitigating factor against the penalty of death, Jalabi wrote, “It is expected in Islam for a man in these circumstances to have moral change in character.... When he shows such behavior, society and the victims’ family should forgive him of his wrongdoing, but only the death penalty will save him from the punishment in hell.”

He was the only one among the six people I talked to about the death penalty and Williams’s execution who described it as a “benefit,” not to Williams’ victims or to society, but to Williams himself. It freed him, Jalabi said, not only from punishment in hell but also from “all responsibilities to all families and society.”

In conversations about Williams’ execution with Jon Turner, a Buddhist, and with Arinder Chadha, who is Sikh, both mentioned karma, but in distinctly different senses.

From a Buddhist point of view, said Turner, who teaches at the Orange County Buddhist Church, it is sad that Williams killed, and it is also sad Williams was killed in return. He can’t see how killing Williams made anything better.

“It seems strange to convict someone of killing someone and then you kill him as punishment,” he said. He wonders how it can possibly pay a moral debt, “as if morality is some sort of currency that can be saved and spent.”

Buddhists, according to Turner, would rather do something to alleviate the causes of violence than do more violence. “Otherwise,” he said, “this cycle will never end.” In the Buddhist sense of karma, the effects of what Williams did -- what any of us do -- bad and good, live on forever.

Sukh Chugh, who like Arinder Chadha is Sikh, personally shared some of Turner’s concerns and left the Sikh perspective to Chadha. Chugh sees our justice system’s use of the death penalty as symptomatic of a larger social problem. He sees our prison system as a “graduate school on crime.”

“Clearly, [it’s] not working, and in fact,” he said, “I believe, [it] perpetuates this cycle of violence. The death penalty is our way of avoiding, or displacing, the nuisances of our society without really looking at the root causes of the behavior.”

In Chadha’s opinion, however, Williams’ execution was nevertheless meant to be. In an e-mail, the physician and codirector of interfaith activities at the California Sikh Council told me Sikhs are neither for nor against the death penalty. Instead, they believe whatever happens, happens “according to the will of God.” This, in their view, is the law of karma.

Not that there was anything wrong with protesting the execution -- if that’s what one’s conscience dictated -- as long as the protesters weren’t “attached to the results of [their] actions,” Chadha said.

In the end, Williams was an instrument of God. As was the State of California. God used the state to carry out Williams’ execution, which was preordained. And to Chadha, Williams’ claim of redemption was paradoxical.

In Sikhism, he said, redemption, is “the state of realization and emancipation one achieves when one starts walking on the spiritual [plane].” Though a person must strive for redemption by conquering the five vices of lust, greed, anger, desire and ego and by living by what Chadha calls “the highest code of conduct,” it is, ultimately, a gift by the grace of God.

From his perspective, a claim of one’s own redemption is as good as a proof against it. “Tookie had to proclaim his own redemption,” he said, “and that is against Sikh principles, as when one does that, it is his ego speaking, and an egotistic person can never find place in God’s court.”

An open letter on savetookie.org calls for an annual Stanley Tookie Williams Worldwide Redemption Day, the first being held on Dec. 29, 2005, the day Williams would have turned 52 years old.

The website markets his book, “Blue Rage, Black Redemption,” and a bumper sticker that reads, “The State of California just killed an innocent man!” The letter, addressing “Dear Friends and Supporters” and signed by Williams’ longtime supporter and friend, Barbara Becnel, makes it clear she isn’t about to give up continuing his work “to save youth from lives of crime and violence,” maintaining what she believes is “his redemptive legacy” and fighting to prove his innocence.

The case of Stanley Tookie Williams brought worldwide attention to the death penalty debate in the United States, perhaps more attention than ever before. But I’m still not ready to place any bets on how soon this nation is likely to abolish the death penalty.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].

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